Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  As the saint was borne away, the people, in an agony of suspense, scrutinised the patients in order to see if there had been any change. Someone spotted Socrates and pointed. He was shaking his shoulders like an athlete about to throw a javelin, and he was staring with amazement at his hands, moving his fingers in order one by one. He looked up suddenly, saw that everyone was watching him, and waved shyly. An unnatural howl went up from the crowd, and Socrates’ mother fell to her knees, kissing her son’s hands. She stood up, threw up her arms to the wide sky, and called, ‘Praise to the saint, praise to the saint,’ so that in no time at all the whole assembly was hysterical with exhilarated awe. Dr Iannis pulled Pelagia away from the impending crush, and wiped the sweat from his face and the tears from his eyes. He was trembling in every part of his body, and so, he saw, was Pelagia. ‘A purely psychological phenomenon,’ he muttered to himself, and was struck suddenly by the sensation of being an ingrate. The bell of the church began to peal out wildly as nuns and priests decorously fought each other for a tug of the wire.

  The carnival began, impelled as much by general relief and the need to dispel goosepimples as by the natural propensity for celebration that was shared by the islanders. Velisarios permitted Lemoni to put a match to the touch-hole of his cannon, there was a mighty roar, and a glittering shower of foil fluttered down like the golden flakes of Zeus. Socrates walked in a daze of bliss amongst the flurry of hands that clapped him on the back and the hurricane of kisses that descended upon the back of his palm. Ts this the feast of the saint?’ he asked. ‘I know it’s stupid, but I can’t remember coming at all.’ He was drawn into a dance, a syrtos of the young people of Lixouri.

  A small improvised band consisting of askotsobouno bagpipes, a panpipe, a guitar, and a mandolin was winding itself into harmony from different points of the musical compass, and a fine baritone, a quarryman, was inventing a song in honour of the miracle. He sang one line, repeated by the dancers, which gave him time to draw out the next, until a complete song emerged with its own melody:

  ‘On a fine young day I came to see the girls and dance

  I came as a heathen comes with thoughts of wine and food.

  But the saint has washed my doubting eyes,

  And shown that God is good …’

  A line of pretty girls holding hands stepped from side to side at the back, and in front of them a row of young men flicked one leg behind them with their heads twisted backwards, leaping as lightly as crickets. Socrates took the red kerchief of the leading dancer, and to the delight of the spectators performed the most athletic and spectacular tsalimia that any of them had ever seen. As his legs crossed and tipped above the level of his own head, as the words of the song sprang out of his mouth, he knew for the first time the true meaning of exhilaration and relief. His body jumped and spun without the least effort of will, muscles whose existence he had long forgotten snapped like steel, and he could almost feel the sun itself glittering upon his teeth as his face cracked in an enormous, in-suppressible grin. The waul of the bagpipe vibrated inside his head, and suddenly he looked up at the clouds on Mt Aenos, and was struck by the thought that he must have died and entered paradise. He kicked his legs still higher, and his heart sang like a choir of birds.

  A troupe from Argostoli with its own band began to dance a divaratiko, inviting negative criticisms from Lixourians and positive ones from Argostolians, and on the far side of the meadow a posse of the fishermen known as tratoloi began to open bottles and sing lustily all the songs that they had been perfecting for weeks in the tavernas of Panagopoula after they had shared the day’s profit, teased each other, quarrelled over the takings, eaten olives and pretza, and finally arrived at the point where singing was both natural and inevitable.

  They sang together a cantada:

  ‘The garden where you sit

  Has never a need of flowers,

  For you are the blossoms

  And only a fool or the blind

  Would fail to know it.’

  The rapid arpeggios of the guitar tailed away, and the tenor began an arietta. His voice ululated at the top of its range, above the chattering of the crowd and even the crash of Velisarios’ cannon, until his friends joined in and wove a harmony intricate and polyphonic about the melody that he had created, arriving at the end together on exactly the right tone and in the right key, the brotherhood of the sea thus producing conclusive proof of their metaphysical unity.

  Amid the songs and dances the little nuns wove a path, leaving in their wake a plenitude of wine and food. Those who were drunk already began to mock each other, and in places mockery turned itself into insult, and from thence to blows. Dr Iannis left his cheese and melons to staunch bleeding noses and cuts from broken bottles. The women and the more sensible men moved their rugs to places more distant from those who threatened to become unruly. Pelagia moved nearer the monastery and sat on a bench.

  She watched as new dancers brought the traditions of the carnival to the panegyri. Men were turning up dressed absurdly in tight white shirts, white kilts, white gloves, and extravagant paper hats. They were draped in red silk ribbons, clusters of tiny bells, gold jewellery and chains, photographs of sweethearts or the King, and they were accompanied by short little boys garbed satirically as girls. All of them sported masks, hilarious and grotesque, and amongst them was Kokolios, decked in his protesting wife’s most precious clothes. Near the road some youths in fantastic costume and daubed faces began to enact babaoulia, the comic skits in which not even the saint could escape the fate of being lampooned. A swirl of competing polkas, lancers, quadrilles, waltzes and ballos threw the crowd into a chaos of falling bodies, shrieks and insults. Pelagia spotted Lemoni solemnly attempting to set fire to the beard of a capsized priest, and her heart jumped a little when she saw Mandras throwing firecrackers amongst the feet of some dancers from Fiskardo.

  She lost sight of him, and then felt a tap on her shoulder. She looked up and beheld Mandras, his arms thrown back in a mock embrace. She smiled, despite his drunken state, and suddenly he fell to his knees and intoned dramatically, ‘Siora, will you marry me? Marry me or I die.’

  ‘Why do you call me Siora?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you speak Italian and sometimes wear a hat.’ He grinned stupidly, and Pelagia said, ‘Nonetheless, I am hardly an aristocrat and I must not be called Siora.’ She looked at him a moment, and a silence flowered between them, the kind of silence that obliged her to answer his proposal. ‘Of course I’ll marry you,’ she said quietly.

  Mandras leapt into the air, and Pelagia noticed that the knees of his breeches had darkened where he had knelt down in a puddle of wine. He pirouetted and cavorted, and she stood up, laughing. But she could not stand; an invisible force seemed to have glued her to the seat. She sat down hastily, examined her skirts, and realised that Mandras had pinned them to the bench. Her new fiancé threw himself backwards upon the grass and howled with mirth, until suddenly he sat up, composed his face into an expression of extreme seriousness, and said, ‘Koritsimou, I love you with all my heart, but we can’t get married until I come back from the Army.’

  ‘Go and speak to my father,’ said Pelagia, and, her heart seeming to choke her in the throat, she wandered numbly amongst the revellers in order to digest this contradictory miracle. Then, troubled by the curious way in which she did not feel as happy as she ought, she wended her way back to the church in order to be alone with the saint.

  The day wore on, and Mandras failed to find the doctor before drink overcame him. He slept seraphically in a pool of something foul but unidentifiable, whilst nearby Stamatis drew a monarchist knife on Kokolios and threatened to remove his Communist balls, before throwing himself about his neck and swearing eternal brotherhood. Elsewhere a man was stabbed to death over a property dispute that had wrangled on for nearly a hundred years, and Father Arsenios incurred such blurred vision that he mistook Velisarios for his dead father.

  The evening gathered itself together ou
t of the seemingly intractable anarchy of the afternoon when the time arrived for the concluding race. Little boys bestrode fat billy goats, a tiny girl was attached to a large dog, contented inebriates sat themselves backwards upon donkeys, abused and emaciated horses hung their heads as overweight tavern-keepers scrambled up their flanks, and Velisarios seated himself astride the placid bull that he had borrowed.

  There was a false start which it was impossible to remedy, and a delightful stampede commenced before the starter had even had time to raise his kerchief. The little girl on the large dog careered at a tangent towards a fallen joint of lamb, the boys on the billy goats were bucked up and down whilst making progress neither forwards nor backwards, the donkeys trotted obligingly towards places other than the finishing line, and the horses refused to budge at all. Only the bull and its Herculean load plodded in a straight line towards the far end of the meadow, preceded solely by an excited but riderless pig. Velisarios, a popular winner, arrived at the finishing line, dismounted, and, to the amazement and applause of the spectators, took the bull by the horns and with one mighty heave wrestled it to the ground. It lay bellowing with incomprehension and stupefaction as Velisarios was borne away upon the shoulders of the crowd.

  Parties of the intoxicated began to drift away, singing raucously at the tops of their voices:

  ‘We’re leaving the panegyri, boys,

  In a fine old fighting mood.

  We went as pilgrims

  And staggered back drunk

  According to the Holy custom.

  The saint smiles down,

  And we honour him

  By dancing and falling over.’

  Pelagia and the doctor found their way home, Father Arsenios took advantage of the hospitality of the monastery, Alekos slept half way up the mountain in a stone shelter, and Kokolios and Stamatis became lost in the maquis of Troianata whilst searching for their respective wives.

  Back in the madhouse, Mina sat on her bed and wondered where she was. She blinked her eyes and looked down at her legs, noticing that her feet were very dirty. Her uncle came in to say goodbye for another year, and to his astonishment she smiled brightly: ‘Theio, have you come to take me home?’ Her relative stood dumbfounded, cried out incredulously, wheeled about with his clenched fists raised in the air, performed three steps of a kalamatianos for sheer joy, and then rocked her in his arms exclaiming ‘Efkharisto, efkharisto,’ over and over again. She had recognised him, she was no longer gibbering, she no longer felt the compulsion to raise her skirts, she was sane and, at twenty-six, still marriageable – with a dowry and a bit of luck. He blew kisses towards the heavens, and promised the saint that he would find her a dowry even if it killed him.

  It seemed that Gerasimos had performed two miracles that year, and had modestly decided to make one of them less immediately sensational than the other. The glass-eater and his unfortunate fellows dolefully watched her leave, and poignantly wondered how long the saint would make them wait.

  13 Delirium

  Mandras put in no appearance for two days after the feast of the saint, leaving Pelagia to ferment in an agony of agitation. She could not think what could have happened to him, and she invented one reason upon another for his absence, which she felt as a growing lack that was threatening to become more real than the obligations and objects of everyday life.

  She had walked back from the feast with her father, and had deduced that the levity of his conversation was due to a combination of drink and the fact that Mandras had not found him. At every step she had wanted to interrupt his flow of remarks about the psychological nature of the miraculous and his surprisingly coarse observations about what had been going on at the periphery of the feast; she was bursting with an insupportable admixture of anxiety and happiness, and wanted nothing so much as to mention Mandras’ proposal. It was information that weighed more than the entire world, and she needed her father to share it, so that it might be lightened. The doctor had not noticed her flushed cheeks, her erratic attention, her tendency to trip over stones, the overemphatic gestures of her hands, and the slight strangulation of her voice; he had achieved precisely that stage of inebriation where high spirits teetered on the edge of nausea and unsteadiness, and decided to withdraw. His was a happiness that precluded any sensitivity to the state of his daughter’s mind, and she had still not imparted her news by the time that they had reached home, where the doctor had gathered the philosophical Psipsina in his arms and waltzed about the yard before urinating on the mint and retiring to bed, malodorous and fully clothed.

  Pelagia went to her own bed and could not sleep. A gibbous moon slid filaments of eerie silver light through the slats of the shutters, and this conspired with the energetic carpentry of the crickets to keep her lying on her back with her eyes wide open. She had never felt more awake. Her mind looped interminably as it replayed the events of the day; the miracle, the songs and dances, the fights, the race, the proposal. It always came back to that; every train of memory twisted on its track and returned to that handsome boy on his knees by the bench where she sat, Mandras on his knees in a pool of wine, Mandras, so beautiful, luminous, and young; Mandras, as exquisite as Apollo. Perspiration broke out on her limbs as she imagined herself entwined in his embrace, transformed him into an incubus, moved her arms and legs, caressed his back and experienced in absentia the soft curl of his tongue on her breasts and the lithe pressure of his weight.

  ‘I love you,’ she declared, at the same time as doubts assailed her like an invasion of tiny invisible devils. Marriage was such a big thing, it meant giving up one life for another. It meant leaving her father’s house, it meant childbirth and relentless work in place of this gentle idyll with its mock contretemps, its tranquil routines, and its congenial eccentricities. She bridled at the thought of accepting orders and decisions from anyone but her own father, whose commands, however brusque and peremptory, were really requests ironically disguised. What would Mandras be like? How much did she really know him? What evidence did she have that he was patient and humane? He brought gifts, that was sure, but would the gifts not stop when the bargain was secured? Wasn’t he too young and too full of impulses? There was something too decisive about his movements, his unconsidered responses; can you trust someone who replies immediately, without thought? Someone whose actions and words are poetic rather than solidly cogitated? She was frightened by the suspicion that there was something adamantine about the structure of his heart. ‘Could he be a romoi,’ she wondered, ‘without even knowing it himself?’ And how do you tell the difference between desire and love? She listened to the tinny buzz of a mosquito as she compared her fiancé to her father. She adored the latter; yes, that was love. But what did it have in common with her feelings for Mandras? Was it conceivable that service to him would feel so much like liberty? Was it just that there were different kinds of love? If it were not love that she felt for Mandras, then why this breathlessness, this bottomless and perpetual longing that furred her tongue and gave her palpitations? Why, like God or a dictator, did this emotion command her without reason, irresistibly? Why, like the arbitrations of Patir Arsenios, did it seem to have the force of law without the law’s formality? The moon shifted behind the olive tree, casting a ceaseless motion of leaves upon the wall, the melancholy bells of the goats of Mt Aenos rang through the gentle chill of the night, and outside Psipsina could be heard foraging in the yard. ‘Catching her own mice,’ thought Pelagia, as she lay listening to the palpable hunger of her body. She thought of the capricious joie de vivre of the pine marten, its innocence and its complete absorption in the business of being itself, and realised quite suddenly that she had exchanged the carelessness of youth for something very like unhappiness. She imagined that Mandras had died, and as the tears came she was shocked to discover that she also felt relief. She banished the image sternly, and told herself that she was vile.

  In the morning she betook herself to the yard and created tasks for herself that would cause her to see
him as soon as he came around the curve of the road, the same curve where he had been shot by Velisarios. She inspected the ruminating goat for ticks, burned them off with a hot needle, and then burrowed through the coarse hair all over again. She looked up repeatedly to see if it was Mandras who came. Her father went to the kapheneia for breakfast, and it occurred to her that Psipsina might also have ticks. She set the animal on the wall, even closer to the road, and with her fingers brushed the fur against its natural lie. Pelagia buried her nose in the soft fur of its stomach, and felt at once saddened and comforted by the sweetness of the smell. Psipsina wriggled and squeaked with pleasure as the busy fingers found two fleas and broke them between the nails of thumb and forefinger. Unwilling to leave the wall, Pelagia brushed the marten vigorously and pulled out the matted knots of fur. She draped Psipsina about her neck and decided to fetch water, which would take her round the curve altogether. Psipsina slept as Pelagia sat by the well and engaged the other women in conversation; but she forgot every detail of the scandals that were discussed, and her eyes kept flicking away. She began to feel a little sick. She drew more water than she knew how to use, and decided to irrigate the herbs. Wearied with waiting, she sat in the shade of the olive with her arm about the scrawny neck of her goat, which indifferently continued to chew as though there were no other world than its own. Longing turned to impatience, and thence to irritation. In order to spite Mandras, Pelagia decided to go for a walk. It would serve him right if she were not there when he came. She walked along the road in the direction that he would come, sat on a wall until the day grew too hot, and then wandered into the maquis, where she came across Lemoni, who was looking for crickets.